“MAPPE E TRACCE” SPAZI NEUTRI

The 2025 edition of Vincenzo Paonessa’s solo exhibition, “Maps and Traces”, arrives in Rome at Palazzo Brancaccio starting September 19. The halls of the African Space, formerly the Palace Library, will host more than one hundred works by the Calabrian artist, who now lives and works in Mantua.

Curated by Paola Artoni and produced by NUMM Contemporary Art, the exhibition retraces the artist’s creative journey over the years: by reworking geographical maps and inventing new impossible worlds, Paonessa invites us into a utopian dimension marked by peace among peoples.

The project takes on the form of a sentimental retrospective and a visionary journey through collected materials, stitched fragments, and transformed traces. Paonessa’s works are wandering maps: old school maps reassembled, branches and objects returned by the woods and sand, bound by threads, plaster, and minimal gestures that generate new symbologies. In Rome, the exhibition also features a previously unseen body of work—more silent, essential, and abstract—that signals a turning point in the artist’s practice: deep listening to matter becomes language, and abstraction becomes a form of care.

The Roman edition will also present, for the first time, six new works gathered under the title “Neutral Spaces”: color interventions on large antique school maps, conceived as a mature and radical reflection on gesture, form, and emotional geography. These calibrated fields of color do not invade space but rather transform it.